4

THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY

I

n his poem “On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals,” the Aus-

tralian poet Les Murray ruminates on the Australian government’s

mass killing of brumby horses, water buffalo, and Asian cattle, all

examples of domesticated animals that have gone feral and spread out

over Australian landscapes. Australia is notorious for feral species run

amok, from the cane toad to the camel, and now also for how it has

attempted to control or eradicate them. Execution by snipers in helicop-

ters is one of the many techniques that suggest the military scale of the

Australian response. (The gunners involved in these operations have

even put videos documenting this activity on the Internet, apparently

for entertainment.) Murray’s poem explores the contradictions of this

practice through a few descriptive details of the killing: “A necked bulg-

ing cartridge case and animal / both spin to oblivion. Behind an ear, fur

flicks, / and an unknowable headlong world is abolished.”^1 That the nar-

rator can see the fur fly from the impact of the bullet makes sense when

we realize that the helicopters fly just above the stampeding animals

to make the killing easier. The poem’s speaker says that this “luxury

massacre... smells of gas theory,” a kind of extermination aimed at

purifying the landscape, echoing Nazi practices. “The last thing brumby

horses hear / is that ideological sound, the baby boom.” The ideology

that Murray identifies here is born of a “native self-hatred”—that is, a